There’s an anthill beside the road in front of my house, and my dog Skipper is determined to pee on it.
About twice a week, Skipper catches me not paying attention on our walk and intentionally guides me to the grassless lump next to the pavement. As soon as he gets in range, he lifts his leg and blasts this poor ant mound like some sort of hairy death star raining destruction down from space. The mound crumbles in on itself and hundreds of black ants come swarming out into the spray.
This has been going on for months now. I don’t think Skip is hurting the ants, but between his clomping feet and a steam of urine that has to look like Niagara falls landing on your home if you’re an ant, their mound gets pretty much leveled.
When I was younger, I don’t think this would bother me because I wouldn’t have even noticed the drama playing out on the ground. Now, however, I watch the ants scurry to work rebuilding the home that has been yet-again flooded through absolutely no fault of their own, and I just… empathize.
Someone recently told me that positivity is their religion. They practice and sacrifice in the service of keeping an unwavering optimistic outlook on the hardships of life. Ever since hearing this, I have been thinking about converting. I know it’s not a real religion, but maybe we could at least get a cult going. I feel like all we really need to get started are some pamphlets, a van, and the understanding that dedication like this requires fierce determination and (sometimes) sacrifice.
This worldview speaks to me because I am a perpetual optimist and choose to see the good in people and situations whenever possible. I am not, however, naive to the fact that some things just don’t lend themselves to positivity. The universe seems to delight in occasionally taking something we have worked incredibly hard on and tearing it apart for no good reason.
I have a friend who took her family to Disneyland just like she had always imagined. She got there, got the flu, never left the hotel, and has now only seen Disneyland from the photos the rest of her family took on the trip. I have another friend who has spent his whole life exercising and eating well only to end up with awful back problems. I have friends who uprooted their entire lives to take new jobs they immediately despised, friends who poured all they had into a marriage that still ended in divorce, and friends who lived the healthiest life possible and still got cancer.
I know it’s morbid to say these things (and possibly a sin in my new religion/cult), but doing your best only to have life come and level your house with a urine stream from the heavens seems to be a standard part of living. We should occasionally remind ourselves of that so we don’t believe we are doing something wrong.
My instinct at this point in the letter is to switch tone and swoop in with my new positivity cult. I’m not going to do that though. I suspect there’s nothing worse than being an ant covered in dog pee and having someone tell you to “look on the bright side.”
Everyone has to figure out how to process their own hardships, and not all hardships are created equal. I am not writing to you today to tell you to suck it up or to find the silver lining in the unfair thing that happened to you. All I’m writing to say today is that if you have had hardship rain down on you for no reason, I’m really sorry. I know it’s awful and it makes you feel utterly powerless. I wish things like this didn’t happen to good people.
I don’t have an answer about how to make these things okay or to make them not hurt. The only advice I’ve gotten recently on this subject comes from the ants.
Sometimes the thing (or the idea of the thing) we love gets destroyed. The only options we have when this happens are to keep going or not keep going. The ants always keep going. Sometimes they build the same anthill back, and sometimes they build it very differently, and sometimes they pack up and go build a new anthill somewhere else. But they always keep going.
Now, you don’t have to take my new cult pamphlets or get into my van (I’m calling it the positivity ad-VAN-tage!), but I do hope you will hear me when I say I hope you’ll decide to keep going. I hope that, when you are ready, you’ll have the strength to try to see how things might actually work out for the better, how far you’ve come as a person, and how much stronger you are now than you ever thought you could be.
When your anthill gets leveled, I hope you will hang in there and choose to believe there will be better days ahead.
About the photo: My dog, Skipper, impatiently awaiting his walk so he may hunt down said ant hill…
